Now Sim City is coming to town

10:47am Friday 14th March 2008

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From the artist's impression of the proposed Watford Junction development featured in last week's Watford Observer, it seems that our fair town is about to be blessed, once again, with a pile of junk.

If you've still got a copy of last week's paper hanging around - maybe lining the bottom of your budgie cage or sitting in your paper recycling bin - dig it out and turn to Page 5.

Without knowing the first detail about the plans or proposals, if someone had challenged me to do a Uri Geller-style party piece last week by scribbling a psychic sketch showing what the development would look like, I'm pretty sure I would have produced an image that looked uncannily like this.

It's dull, angular, unimaginative and entirely derivative - in fact it's almost undistinguishable from every other development sprouting up in every other town and city in the country.

Look at the sharp edges, look at the blank walls and look at the monumental scale. Despite the optimistic splotches of green that are presumably meant to indicate the presence of plant life, this is not a grand design for the future, but rather a dire warning of the bleak depressing times lying in wait for the hapless souls destined to haunt this stalag - whether as workers or inhabitants.

If you take a close look at the proposed image you'll notice that the people thoughtfully sketched into the scene are colourless and transparent. They look like irritating afterthoughts, added in for scale once the glories of the architecture had been realised on the page.

In fact, they look quite like characters from the popular Sims computer game, which, for the uninitiated, gives players the chance to create a virtual city and the people who inhabit it, and then interfere with their lives in a manner that could almost be described as God-like.

A bit like the architects and developers who come up with human gerbil stacks like this monstrosity and then expect people to live and work in them.

To me this seems like lazy, copycat architecture of the most depressing kind. Its main cultural reference appears to be the blighted, urban landscape of the 1960s, which played a crucial role in creating a generational swathe of disaffected, isolated, anti-social and depressed Britons trapped in their high-density housing units by low expectations.

This was not building on a human scale, it was a bean counter's vision of perfection where success was measured by statistics not emotions.

I don't know what depressed me most about that scrappy little sketch last week; the fact that someone, somewhere actually approved its release or the fact that someone came up with it in the first place.

I was shocked recently to learn that these days most national architectural courses have pretty much abandoned the study of historic drawing and design. Many students now leave university after having studied architecture for five years or so, without a working knowledge of anything designed before Le Corbusier.

No wonder so many buildings being foisted on our towns and cities today are so uniform and so dull.

There is nothing wrong with the clean lines and sharp angles of the buildings produced by the modernists back in the 1920s and 30s. At the time they were exciting and challenging. But 70 years later it's depressing to see that, for the most part, modern architecture has degenerated to a static and weak pastiche of something that was once bold, brilliant and new.

Students of fashion study the practical history of design as an integral component of their course. When world-class designers like Vivienne Westward and John Galliano send their skyscraper models down the catwalk they are feted for the thoughtful reference to the past clearly present in their collections.

Whether it's a corset, a bustle, a clever bias cut or a Grecian-style drape, these are cutting-edge designs that have been inspired by a deep knowledge of the style and expertise of generations gone before. Great fashion designers actually use historic design as an essential creative tool.

It's odd that we greatly appreciate and value the skills of the past in something worn for one season, whereas we happily expect people to live for decades in a box where the principal lesson applied appears to be accountancy.

Look again at that artist's impression and ask yourself what it will really look like when it is a concrete and plate glass reality. Where is the excitement in that design? Where is the fun, the surprise and the imagination?

For classical architects the line of beauty was a curve - something so shapely, so graceful and so human. And something completely absent from this hum-drum proposal.

We should be building for people, not for computer simulations. And we should definitely look carefully at the density of this proposed development as a critical part of the design process. Watford might well have to fulfil a government target to provide 5,000 new homes by 2021, but rushing to cram 1,000 of them into a ready-made dead zone in the heart of this already massively congested town could have disastrous repercussions.

On a practical level alone, I cannot imagine how Watford's groaning infra-structure will cope with the cars owned by 1,000 households and office workers in such a sensitive area.

In the past 50 years or so, our town has been scarred by so many unworthy developments and unsightly buildings that it has become a national byword for the ugly and the commonplace. How many times have you heard comedians take Watford's name in vain?

On this 15-acre patch of land near Watford Junction we have the chance to do something right for once by creating an original and above all beautiful place in highly visible area that our town can be proud of.

From the drawing board onwards, Watford doesn't have to accept the bland, mono-architecture that blights every other town and city of the early 21st Century Our town motto is "Audentior" - which means boldness. I often wish the council would remember that.